The Complete Picture

It’s extremely rare to find an entire skeleton of a fossil amphibian. But that’s what this is – except for a few missing pieces of the hands and feet and the very tip of the tail. In fact, the skeleton was in such exquisite condition that it enabled palaeontologists to fully describe this 300 million-year-old amphibian, Dendrerpeton, for the first time. This fossil, from the Carboniferous Period, was discovered on the beach at Joggins by Lin Kebang and Wu Xiao-chun, members of a field party from the Red Path Museum in Montreal. All of the tiny lines you see show the great care that was taken by preparator Diane Scott in removing excess rock in order to reveal the full extent of the skeleton.